Quotes from Matt Haig

Nora had no idea what success was. She had felt like a failure for so long.

I loved someone once. A woman. I loved her madly. Do you understand? We were together, in secret, for nearly twenty years. And we were told we couldn't talk about that love… because it was dangerous. It was dangerous to love […] There comes a time when the only way to start living is to tell the truth. To be who you really are, even if it is dangerous.

Past and future were myths. The past was just the present that had died and the future would never exist anyway, because by the time we got to it, the future would have turned into the present. The present was all there was. The ever-moving, ever-changing present. And the present was fickle. It could only be caught by letting go.

Si ce, ai o eticheta? "Depresiv". Toata lumea ar purta o eticheta daca ar intreba pe specialistul care trebuie.

At the sub-atomic level, everything is complex. But you do not live at the sub-atomic level. You have the right to simplify. If you don't, you will go insane.

She wasn't a black hole, she decided she was a volcano. And like a volcano, she couldn't run away from her self. She'd have to stay there in 10 to that wasteland. She could plan a forest inside of herself

I read and read and read with an intensity I'd never really known before. I mean, I'd always considered myself to be a person who liked books. But there is a difference between liking books and needing them. I needed books. They weren't a luxury good during that time in my life. They were a Class A addictive substance.

Remember, during your mission, never to become influenced or corrupted. The humans are an arrogant species, defined by violence and greed. They have taken their home planet, the only one they currently have access to, and placed it on the road to destruction. They have created a world of divisions and categories and have continually failed to see the similarities among themselves. They have developed technology at a rate too fast for human psychology to keep up

they'll be okay. they're looked after. the flowers have their water.

I want you to Slow down I just want it all To slow down; I want to make a forest Of a moment And live in that forest For ever Before you go

I understand that the way you stop time is by stopping being ruled by it. [Tom Hazard]

Light was everything.

Maybe she just had no incentive to swim above the line [...]. Maybe in some lives you just float around and expect nothing else and don't even try to change [...]. A starfish in every life is still a starfish. There isn't a life where a starfish is a professor of aerospace engineering.

It was then I realised the one thing worse than having a dog hate you is having a dog love you.

Past and future were myths. The past was just the present that had died and the future would never exist anyway, because by the time we got to it the future would have turned into the present.

silence   Humans fear silence. If you ever want to make one feel uncomfortable, stop in the middle of a conversation for no apparent reason. Then stare deep into their eyes.

And we risk only ever looking above to the future or below to the past and never around at the infinite horizontal landscape of the present. The trouble with ladders is they give you no room to move around. Just room to fall.

She remembered studying Aristotle as a first-year Philosophy student. And being a bit depressed by his idea that excellence was never an accident. That excellent outcomes were the result of 'the wise choice of many alternatives

Maybe even the most seemingly perfectly intense or worthwhile lives ultimately felt the same. Acres of disappointment and monotony and hurts and rivalries but with flashes of wonder and beauty. Maybe that was the only meaning that mattered. To be the world, witnessing itself.

As well as being highly critical of everything Nora did, and everything Nora wanted and everything Nora believed, unless it was related to swimming, Nora had also felt that simply to be in his presence was to commit some kind of invisible crime.

On both sides of her family there had been an unspoken belief that life was meant to fuck you over.

Places are places and memories are memories and life is fucking life.

Every universe exists over every other universe. Like a million pictures on tracing paper, all with slight variations within the same frame.